If the impact of the October Days of 1789 upon the revolutionary process in France has sometimes been exaggerated, much the same may be said of 9 Thermidor, Year II (27 July 1794). Granted, Robespierre's downfall was important in that it signaled the start of a drastic turnabout in the government's policy of political and economic “terror.” It is also safe to conclude in hindsight that the execution of the “Robespierrists” dashed any prospects for the realization of the most millenarian social, economic, and cultural reforms envisioned by the Jacobins and their sans-culotte allies. Still, when we contemplate the Revolution in its larger, global-historical setting, Thermidor seems to be but a halting place on a road marked from beginning to end by the crushing continuity of war and all its attending circumstances. And in fact an analysis of the five years or so running from the end of the Terror to the Bonapartist coup d'état of November 1799 drives this point home with added force by showing us a revolution ultimately consumed in the blaze of an unprecedented international conflict.

The following pages commence with a brief synopsis of events. Turning then to analysis, the chapter will first reappraise the interactions between an ever more aggressive and globally oriented France and the other European Powers. The discussion will then take up the most important domestic policies of the French government in this period and show how those policies at times exposed enduring tensions between the state's ambitions and the idealism and socioeconomic interests of the Revolution.